Hackberry Hollow

Usually when I create a piece of concept art I take something from our notes and visualize it on my own. But this piece of concept art is different. This grayscale painting was created while Adam was watching the whole time to help plan the most complex location in the comic. It may not look complex but this is just the shot of the front door.

This is just the initial stage of the design process based on some preliminary 3D sculpts (after the jump).

Well, a raven or a crow. She’s one of those two. I guess both species look so alike that it doesn’t matter too much. But one thing for sure is that she is all crazy.

This is more of a costume design exercise than anything else, but it has a character in it so why not call it a character design post.

Hackberry Hollow has been interesting to design because we have animal people, animal animals, and undead versions of each. So not only do I need to design an interesting look for the fluffy characters, but the not-so-fluffy as well.

When people ask us what the log line for Hackberry Hollow is we respond with “it is a story about a taxidermist in a world where all of the people are animals” and of course creating undead which is where the necromancy comes in (evil grin). So here we have it: the first ever character design to be put up on the blog if you don’t count the robots.

I started doing a rotation of the new robot design so I can figure out what it looks like from all angles. Getting a design for one angle of a character is just a small part of the battle. You have to design it from all sides.

Here’s part 2 of what was posted last week regarding using Alchemy to aid in character design. I wonder what will happen when we take the new shapes and apply it to our original concept and rendering style?

After the jump we’ve got some information on the process of how we take the random shapes and use that to create an actual design.

Recently I’ve been researching and experimenting with a bunch of different techniques to help me design the characters of Hackberry Hollow. This week I’ve tried a couple of new things. The first one was sculpting characters to help me understand the 3D form to help me draw them, and the other is using a program called Alchemy which I used to create the above images.

I decided to go ahead and take over the post for this week, mainly so that Glen can have the time he needs to be able to get character design done without going into temporary insanity over the endless tasks that pile up in his to-do lists.

One of the time consuming parts of creating art is figuring out exactly what colors to use. That’s one of the reasons why color keys are important to us. Not only does it help us create a color script for the comic, but once we get into production all we have to do is eye-drop our color keys and just paint away. We can skip the usual color study phase of our process once we get into production because we’ve already done it for all the art in that scene once before.